Commenters invoke historical critique of 'push' versus 'pull' internet
5 Sep 21 2:30 PM · 2d ago · 5 comments · 1 source · development 5 of 5
Users referenced earlier predictions about a 'push' internet (platforms controlling what reaches you) versus the original 'pull' model (users deciding what to fetch). One noted the shift from symmetrical web authorship (W3C's Amaya browser) to passive consumption modeled on television.
“W3C's Amaya browser was as much an editor as it was a browser. Production and consumption were supposed to be symmetrical. This was the promise of the web.”
weinzierlAlice Girard Guittard Software engineer, Tsukumogami Software co-founder
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Claim of the moment: "Attention is all you have" https:// alicegg.tech/2026/09/21/attent ion
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No internet use is inherently intentional. Old-style internet made you choose where to go, but that doesn't make the use intentional. We make choices all the time on auto-pilot. Choosing isn't the same as being intentional.It's true that it's harder to stay present on addictively designed feeds. But I find it difficult to stay present even…
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Bookmarks died because most humans are allergic to having to do bookkeeping and cleanup tasks that are incidental to what they really want to do.We see that over and over again, in a bunch of non-tech fields. My kids never want to clean up their toys; they will pull out new ones, but it is a struggle to get them into the habit of putting the old…
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"The Mosaic browser (1993) had full text history search."The earlier CERN, later W3C, LineMode browser, named "www", also kept a full text history by defaultEach website gets a separate folder, e.g., "308" in the example belowAn .index file contains a log of all requested URLs with timestamps /tmp/w3c-cache/.index Pages are cached in temp files…
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> Do you want to listen to music? Just open a Spotify playlist and let the algorithm figure out what you like. Please ignore the AI slop they will insert in between real songs to avoid paying royalties to real artists.To be honest it is worse than this. Spotify over the years just seems to have gotten worse and worse at the one job I want it to do…
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To me, LLMs were the best thing that ever happened when it comes to attention. They allow me to stay focused on what I was sitting for on the computer in the first place, because all that discovery with ads in between or annoying JS activated banners are all gone now.Why would I bother to read advertisements anymore?I also built ZIMdex and gave my…
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I just discovered https://hister.org/ (I think from a link here on hacker news) ... it solves the full text history search really really well. - Local go server to index everything into sqlite or postgres - browser extension to send the DOM for indexing. - This happens after each page is finished rendering, so client side rendering doesn't break…
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I tend to agree with the post, but narrowly on the hook:> Do you want to listen to music? Just open a Spotify playlist and let the algorithm figure out what you like. Please ignore the AI slop they will insert in between real songs to avoid paying royalties to real artists.To be honest, my Spotify recommendation algorithm complaint is about the…
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The great internet dishes your a personalized world, that is just designed to your order. This is not something specific to internet.The physical world around you is also sculpted by your actions. You "feel at home" while at home only because you have adjusted it to become your mould. You become an integral piece in your world, making you a piece…
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My antidote to this was 100% selfhosting from home as you are now on par with the platforms and have a choice to serve yourself.You cannot stay focused all day and theres nothing wrong with "just show me random dumb stuff" i mean i wont lie, im old and RTL2 was a thing you know even in educated circles. These no tv people read bad fiction…
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> But like every habit, the only thing you have to do is to keep at it. And if you pay enough attention to it, something will click in your brain.a bad habit i noticed after taking hiatus of focused work was me jumping into different windows and tabs and just mindlessly consuming content without finishing them. after noticing this pattern, i…
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Yea, indeed I think we have to proactively keep getting away from doomscrolling/other things which hijack our attention and I don't think it's easy for anyone. It's also not bad if you do it in small doses.> Doomscrolling will make you stay longer and click on a few more ads. I've personally never bought something out of a Google ad. Tbh how much…
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W3C's Amaya browser [1] was as much an editor as it was a browser. Production and consumption were supposed to be symmetrical. This was the promise of the web.Instead we turned it into a worse version of television, where you still only consume passively what is fed to you while being watched and analysed.[1]
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Plug for the app I built that's helping me significantly: NoMo ScreentimeIt blocks all distracting apps. To unblock, I need to choose # of minutes upfront, then pause and put my phone face down for sometime. And then, it unblocks the app for the time I requested, and blocks it again.
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I heard the term "Gruen Transfer"[1] to describe the successful hijacking of attention in a store. I think it's useful to describe digital platforms, too - you go to YouTube to watch a video recommended by a friend, and then when you're done, The Feed attempts to pull a Gruen on you.[1]
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Related and not related. Fans of https://andymatuschak.org/ might want to know that he is now working at https://x.com/pico, which apparently has the same tagline as this article "Attention is all you have". But really truly don't click that link that site is a hellhole.(Edit: Wording)
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Back in 2012 I switched almost entirely from bookmarking to web clipping into Evernote, which has been great. Evernote itself has gone downhill, and at some point soon I'll probably migrate my collection to Obsidian (which has its own web clipper), but I'm still a big advocate of the general practice. It is indeed great to have a searchable record…
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I use my bookmark tab. I am not particularly interested in storing a copy of almost any of the links I have in my bookmark tab (why would I want a copy of some Grafana instance?)I do get that for some people it's about research and collecting documents. For me it's basically "quick access to the most recent version of the thing at this URL"
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I am pretty sure early versions of the Safari browser (in the 2000s) did in fact store a full-text version of every webpage in the history and allow you to search that. I even remember looking at the plist files where Safari stored all the extracted text.I relied on that a lot until one day a random system update deleted all my old browsing…
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I have a wallabag setup for my interesting bookmarks, and it downloads and indexes the contents of these bookmarks. I read the contents later in a PocketBook, free of distractions from the normal devices. It is a bit of setup work, but just totally frictionless after it was setup. Firefox also has Pocket, which I used before switching to wallabag.
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I noticed that i often spend lots of hours on my computer without doing anything useful but instead doomscrolling on hacker news and watching countless Youtube videos i hardly understand and give little attention. I think i could solve this by making a list of things i want to do on my computer before turning it on, but i haven't tried yet
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I have this with websites I read a few months ago, stuff from 1993 that is still alive is pure luck at this point. Nothing more frustrating than wanting to share a link with a colleague that you have seen recently and remember a couple of cribs from but that doesn't stand out enough in the history to ring a bell.
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spent a couple of weeks in the mountains without a phone and my god was that life changing. I realized most of the negative thoughts I had were not really mine, and I have more time now to spend doing something more meaningful to me rather than wasting hours (and significant brainpower) doomscrolling.
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Browsers should've had tab groups decades ago, and bookmarks in a group should've gone into that group's corresponding bookmark folder by default. Voluntary tab groups use time at the user's convenience, while organizing bookmarks into folders tend to be a distraction or chore.
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